As drought worsens, officials say mandatory water cuts likely coming for urban Californians

With the drought showing no signs of abating, California officials announced Wednesday they plan to deliver almost no water from the State Water Project to begin next year — and suggested that mandatory cutbacks in urban usage could come if conditions stay dry.

Karla Nemeth, director of the Department of Water Resources, said the various cities and farm-irrigation districts that belong to the State Water Project — the elaborate state-run network of reservoirs and canals — are getting “essentially a zero allocation” to start 2022.

While conditions could improve if the winter turns wet, it marks the first time that the project has announced a zero allocation initially for the upcoming year. The project delivered a 5% allocation in 2021.

The member agencies won’t be completely shut out. Nemeth said the project expects to deliver 340,000 acre-feet of water for “critical health and safety needs” to a handful of urban contractors, with most of the water going to the large Metropolitan Water District of Southern California. Still, that’s just a sliver of the 4.2 million acre-feet the project is supposed to deliver in a wet year.

“We have such exceedingly dry conditions,” Nemeth said. “We are absolutely living climate change.” An acre-foot is 326,000 gallons.

So far Gov. Gavin Newsom has resisted suggestions that he institute mandatory conservation measures on urban Californians. That could well change if the drought continues much longer, Nemeth said.

“If conditions continue this dry, we’ll see mandatory cutbacks,” she told reporters on a Zoom call. She said the state will work with local government agencies to impose mandatory rules, and “if they won’t, the state will.”

To this point, urban Californians have largely ignored Newsom’s call for a 15% cutback in urban water use. In September, the most recent month with available data, urban Californians cut back a mere 3.9% compared with a year earlier, according to the State Water Resources Control Board.

Last water cutbacks from a drought

The last time urban Californians saw mandatory conservation was in 2015, when former Gov. Jerry Brown ordered a 25% cutback. The restrictions were largely lifted the following year, and lifted altogether when historic rain and snow fell on California in 2017, prompting Brown to cancel the drought emergency.

While Newsom hasn’t yet imposed across-the-board restrictions, the State Water Resources Control Board this week released proposed new rules that would force homeowners to stop wasting water outdoors. The proposed rules include prohibitions on letting water run on sidewalks or driveways, and a ban on washing a car unless the hose has a shutoff valve. Most cities, including Sacramento, already have rules similar to those already in place.

The State Water Project’s zero initial allocation speaks to the severity of the drought and the degree to which available supplies are stretched perilously thin. In 1991, the project’s agricultural districts got a zero allocation, but urban districts received 30% of what they requested.

The federal government hasn’t yet announced an initial allocation for its Central Valley Project, which runs in tandem with the state project, but it’s likely it too will come out at zero. The federal project delivered no water to most of its contractors this year.

Despite a stunningly strong start to the water season, thanks to record rainfall in late October, state officials and other experts believe California could be in for another dry winter.

Although two small storms could hit Northern California next week, “we’re not talking anything significant here,” said Jan Null of Golden Gate Weather Services, a private forecasting consultant.

And with each dry day that goes by, the effect of the Oct. 24 rainstorm diminishes. “We’re eating up that bonus we got Oct. 24 pretty rapidly,” Null said.

That’s left state officials to undertake a delicate balance between agriculture, urban use and the environment. Nemeth said state officials are conferring on how to keep river temperatures cool enough to maintain fragile fish populations and other needs, but she added: “When there’s no water in the system, the environment is going to suffer as well.”

Already this year, the vast majority of the juvenile winter-run Chinook salmon population perished in the relatively warm waters of the Sacramento River, state officials believe, although exact figures haven’t yet been released. The winter-run Chinook is listed as an endangered species.

What’s more, Nemeth announced that state and federal officials have asked the State Water Resources Control Board to relax water-quality standards in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, the estuary that serves as the hub of California’s water system. That would allow the two water projects to keep more water in the system and let less water flow to the ocean.

Still, the state can’t ignore Delta water quality altogether. Lake Oroville, the linchpin of the State Water Project, is less than one-third full, and most of its water will be dedicated to flushing salinity out of the Delta. If too much salt water pours into the Delta from the Pacific, it renders much of the delivery network inoperable.

But some of the water stored in Oroville and San Luis Reservoir, the main reservoir south of the Delta, will go for urban usage. Metropolitan, which serves 19 million Southern Californians, will get about 80% of that supply. Another 10% will go to the Santa Clara Valley Water District, while the rest will be split among smaller agencies such as Napa County, Yuba City and Plumas County.